Your sales potential is very important to Amazon. They want to put the products that will sell the best in the top spot. But how do they measure your sales potential?

For starters, they look at your sales. They consider how much your product is selling and how often “window shoppers” become “buyers.” Another big thing they look at is your reputation. What do people think of your brand and your products? A good reputation goes a long way towards making more sales. Finally, customer service is important to Amazon. Happy customers means more sales.

Keep reading for some tips in each of these areas, our best piece of advice regarding search rank, and some final thoughts on implementing your Amazon SEO strategy.

Sales

Sales have a very strong correlation with search rank. The more sales you, have the higher you will be listed, and the higher you are listed, the more sales you will get. It’s a classic case of chicken and egg. However, don’t rely too heavily on sales to measure changes in search rank. There are a lot of factors that could explain increases or decreases in sales, so keep that in mind when using this metric.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is the number of people who buy your product divided by the number of people who view your listing. What matters here is how appealing users find your product page. Having a clear feature list and description, quality images, and generally positive reviews will help.

You can calculate your conversion rate by doing some simple math. Just divide your orders by your page views and multiply by 100. To find these numbers, log in to SellerCentral and go to “Reports” followed by “Business Reports: Detail Page Sales and Traffic (By ASIN)”.

The average conversion rate is somewhere around 4% on Amazon, going up to around 8% on holidays. If you’re at or above that rate, you’re doing well. However, keep in mind that conversion rate can vary based on product category. Do some research into similar products and try to get a sense of what your rate should be.

If you’re below a 3% conversion rate (or below whatever the average for your category is), you probably need to take a hard look at your product page. The “Product Listing” portion of this series can help you with this.

Product Rating

It goes without saying that product rating is a direct indicator of an item’s quality, so it would be a no-brainer for Amazon to include this metric in their algorithm. You’ll rarely see a product with an average rating lower than 4 stars in the first page of results.

If you’re at or around there, you’re in a good spot. If you’re below that metric, then maybe your listing needs a little TLC. There are a lot of reasons your rating might be suffering, so spend some time reading through your reviews to get to the root of the problem. Regardless of which group you fall into, it always pays to keep an eye on your product reviews.

Customer Service

Along with being a generally good practice, having a strong customer service presence on your Amazon listings can boost your search ranking quite nicely. Amazon’s algorithm measures average rating, questions answered, and negative feedback rate. If you’re willing to make customer service a priority, all of these areas are easy to improve. All it takes is paying a little more attention to your listings!

Conclusion: Monitoring Your Progress

Our most important SEO advice? Commit. Halfhearted attempts to improve search rank will never work. It takes dedication and time to figure out what will help you move to that number one spot, and equally important, what will help you stay there.

Made a change to your listing? Watch to see if it’s helping (or hurting). Ranking suddenly dropped? Take action immediately to recover.

At Efficient Era we love feedback loops because they help us stay on top of things. One of the best ways to make sure your SEO is improving is by actually tracking your position. As you make changes to your listing, this will allow you test what works and what doesn’t.

SEO is at once one of the most difficult and most important aspects of online sales. If you’re just starting out, it can feel like you’re completely invisible and all your potential customers are drifting to much bigger brands. Don’t worry though - everyone has to start somewhere and it’s easier than you think to move up the ranks.

The first few sales are the hardest. Once Amazon recognizes that your product will sell and you get a few reviews, your recognition and ranking will begin to rise. At this point, all the steps you took to optimize your listing will come into play in full force.

You could write a book about SEO and still not cover everything there is to know. With this series, we tried to provide a general overview of what you can do to get started and clear up some the questions about Amazon’s search algorithm.